zlacker

you're phrasing it like web hosting is some gargantuan unheard of task.

> It is not free to publish journals, or keep tens of thousands of them, with millions of articles, around indefinitely, for instant access by anyone on the web.

it's not free but it's pretty cheap. you can pay a tiny fraction of what the public universities are currently paying for access to these journals to maintain a repository of scientific papers.

look at scihub, is it being funded by Bezos, Bill or Buffet? no. if a single person can host all those papers herself backed by only random donations, I don't think any government or hell, any university would have any trouble doing the same thing with marginal amount of support.

>>deepbu+(OP)
If you do some research and then want to publish it in a journal, there is a large scope of work on the publishing side which includes hosting. Scihub just redistributes what journals have already spent the money to vet, edit, proof and publish. The "cost of access" is paying for all of the aforementioned work. So there is a lot more to do, and pay for, that is not being captured by people looking from the sidelines going "why is nobody giving me free cake?"

If all you want to do is say "we have pre-pubs on a free FTP server", sure, that's cheap as hell. But it doesn't replace the journals, it doesn't address research funding models, it doesn't move scientific progress forward.